Fiction review: 'Not in the Flesh' by Ruth Rendell

BOOKS - NOVEL

No one creates killers or polishes them off quite like Ruth Rendell, England's No. 1 crime writer.

Remember the creepy, cunning Teddy Grex in A Sight for Sore Eyes, the London youth who ended as a victim of his own evil?

The author, now in her fifth decade of writing tales of psychological suspense and detection under her own name and the pseudonym Barbara Vine, has said she grew up in a dysfunctional home that left her filled with fears and a jaundiced view of the world.

Rendell also has been quoted as saying that she doesn't think there is such a thing as a happy family, a conviction that echoes through Not in the Flesh, her latest novel in the Chief Inspector Wexford series.

For instance, landowner and frustrated developer John Grimble is domineering and bad-tempered and, like his wife Kathleen, sinking into premature old age.

Successful author Owen Tredown, dying of cancer, leads a weird existence sheltered by his distinctly unsettling current and former wives.

A frightened woman lives with an abusive lover while yearning to find out what happened to her fiance who disappeared on the eve of their wedding.

An immigrant family from Somalia is trying to have the rite of genital mutilation performed on their young daughter.

But the novel opens with a deceptively bucolic feel.

Jim Belbury and his truffle-hunting dog, Honey, are out for an early morning walk in the English countryside when Honey sniffs out what at first looks like a giant fungus.

On closer inspection, the lump turns out to be the bones of a human hand.

Once the medical examiner confirms that the bones are those of a man who has probably been dead for about 10 years, the genial Wexford and his sidekick, the politically correct Hannah Goldsmith, compile a list of 85 people reported missing in the past decade.

They include a mentally retarded man and a schoolteacher who disappeared after attending a funeral.

Then a second body -- also thought to have been dead for about a decade -- is discovered in the basement of a deserted house.

Not only does Rendell deal with killers but she puts her finger firmly on the pulse of Britain's changing demographics, spotlighting the horrors of female circumcision through the eyes of Matea, a young waitress from Somalia, who is desperate to stop her parents from having the operation performed on her 5-year-old sister.

A less assured writer than Rendell could leave a reader totally confused as storylines cross and sometimes branch in different directions along parallel tracks.

But this dame of British literature knows what it takes to deliver the inevitable knock-out punch.